The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010 by Peter Hennessy: review

Dominic Sandbrook finds out what would have happened if the Bomb had
dropped

By Dominic Sandbrook

12:55PM BST 10 Aug 2010

There seems to be no reasonable hope,” wrote Arthur Koestler as the shadow of the Cold War fell over Europe, “of preventing the destruction of European civilisation, either by total war’s successor Absolute War, or by Byzantine conquest – within the next few decades.”

The Secret State by Peter Hennessy

He was right about that. For 20 years the peoples of the world shuddered at the prospect of nuclear annihilation and then, in October 1968, the moment came. The crisis began in the Baltic, which the Soviet leadership declared a “sea of peace”, and the Balkans, where troops massed on the Bulgarian and Albanian borders. As the international temperature rose, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee began planning for the worst, discussing transition-to-war measures, stockpiling essential supplies and urging the Wilson government to take emergency powers. In university towns, students demonstrated for peace, while in Britain’s ports, militant dockers refused to handle goods bound for the army in West Germany.

The Third World War broke out on Saturday, October 20 1968, with Warsaw Pact forces pouring across the borders into Austria and Finland. The next day, crowds besieged the US and Soviet embassies, while the Cabinet authorised the Prime Minister to approve nuclear action if Nato requested it. By Wednesday, millions were staying away from work, while builders’ merchants were besieged by people wanting materials for makeshift nuclear shelters.

What happened next? We will never know: this was, of course, merely an exercise, conducted over one night by Cabinet Office planners. Hidden away in the archives and unearthed by the indefatigable Peter Hennessy, the so-called war books provide a tantalising but chilling glimpse of what might have happened if history had unfolded differently – Whitehall’s equivalent of a Tom Clancy blockbuster.

Transition to war exercises were never entirely gloomy affairs: at the end of the Seventies, Hennessy tells us, one Cabinet Office planner brought an exercise to an end by putting on a tin helmet and sticking a large arrow marked “this way to Walmington-on-Sea” on the huge map board. But the spirit of Dad’s Army would have helped us little if the worst had indeed come to the worst. As the revised edition of Hennessy’s history of the Cold War state reminds us, the consequences of war would have been utterly cataclysmic, with tens of millions killed at a stroke and Britain reduced to an irradiated wasteland. That this apocalyptic fiction never became horrifying fact, he writes, “is by far the greatest shared boon of my lifetime”.

The new edition of Hennessy’s book, which contains several new chapters and plenty of newly released archival material, has all the strengths and weaknesses of its predecessor. No historian is more adept at unearthing half-forgotten documents or knows more secrets of the Whitehall jungle; but none has such a fondness for flowcharts or a mania for memos.

Boyishly keen to remind us that he knows where the paper clips are buried, Hennessy never misses a chance to advertise his seminars on the Mile End Road or his regular lunch dates with the mandarin class. It is entirely characteristic that when a “senior SIS figure” wonders whether Britain’s obsession with military intelligence is merely “the itch after the amputation”, Hennessy cannot resist noting that he did so “during a lunchtime discussion at Vauxhall Cross”. If a nuclear bomb ever does fall on London, it will surely find Hennessy having lunch with the man from the Ministry.

Yet for anyone eager to peek behind the curtain of secrecy, The Secret State has plenty of fascinating nuggets. Almost unbelievably, Home Office scientists in the mid-Sixties circulated an in-house journal called Fission Fragments with, of all things, a Spot the Bomb competition, inviting readers to work out ground zero from the fallout plumes after an imaginary nuclear attack.

And perhaps only Hennessy could have got Denis Healey to admit that he would never have approved British nuclear retaliation, even if the Soviet Union had launched missiles of its own, because the majority of the victims would have been “innocent civilians”. By contrast, Jim Callaghan revealed that if “it was necessary to do it, then I would have done it”, although “if I had lived after having pressed that button, I could never, never have forgiven myself”.

Sadly, Hennessy’s final chapter, which covers threats to the realm after 2001 and has a great deal of stuff on flowcharts, White Papers and committees, will probably leave many ordinary readers cold. Yet this humane and thoughtful historian, who has done more than any other to illuminate the dusty corridors of power, is surely absolutely right to warn that political arrogance, present-mindedness and media pressure are gradually corrupting our ability to look forward with clarity and humility.

When Nato was founded in 1949, its architects could never have imagined that one day its forces would find themselves fighting, not Soviet tanks on the streets of West Germany, but warlords in the mountains of Afghanistan. But as this book reminds us, we can never know what will be waiting for us around the corner.

Dominic Sandbrook’s State of Emergency, 1970-74 is published next month by Allen Lane